The Double

Rating:
Summary: Digressions are the sunshine.
Review: "Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine - they are the life, the soul of reading." - Laurence Sterne.
Believing the above statement to be true would really help a reader enjoy Saramago and I happen to be one of the believers. I cannot think of an author who uses the device of digression moreso than Saramago. For me, the near-constant philosophizing of the narrator and the characters is one of the things that I love the most about his work. This is the fifth Saramago book I have read and it has helped me arrive at the conclusion that he is my favorite living author.
There is no point in my re-stating the plot or storyline because the amazon page itself (above) really provides a perfect synopsis. So do the fine reviews that follow mine here on this page. But here is the one thing that I would ask the prospective reader to ponder...
What would it be like to suddenly find that there is another person in the world that is exactly like you, in every respect? Another YOU! A double. A doppelganger.
In its psychological twistings and turnings and in a writing style that is as wonderful and coherent as it is inimitable and unorthodox, this is the very question that Saramago brings the reader FACE to FACE with!
My initial answer to the question was "Hmmm, no big deal. So what? I have a double. Who cares?" With The Double, Saramago has now blown the lid off of such an easy answer. Sure, the book is not ABOUT me or you, but in Tertuliano Maximo we see shades of who we all are. And the thoughtful (and patient) reader will find that they are drawn into a vortex of identity trauma along with the protagonist himself.
Who AM I, if there is another me?
Be patient with the book, especially if you are new to Jose Saramago... give it time, you will be rewarded. Stick with the convolutions and dialogues with "common sense"... the absolutely crazy ending is worth it all.
Saramago. What can one say? He is the literature teacher's worst nightmare! He does not even use "proper" punctuation. Most conventional rules of writing are thrown to the wind. Like one reviewer noted, J.S. even tells you ahead of time what is going to happen to his characters later on in the story. It is crazy.
Is The Double a good book to start with if you are new to Saramago? Not really, in my opinion. The Cave, or Blindness, would be a better pier to jump off of.
But jump. Do it.
Swim with a partner, if need be.
T.y.L.i.I.



Rating:
Summary: Double trouble.
Review: I always start a new Jose Saramago novel with a sense of excitement. The 1998 Nobel-Prize winner's DOUBLE is about identity, both literal and symbolic. THE DOUBLE tells the story of an ordinary history teacher employed in a secondary school, Tertuliano Maxim Afonso, who discovers his double "in every respect" (p. 191), while watching a rental video, "The Race is to the Swift." Afonso is divorced, depressed, indifferent, and inattentive in his mundane existence. "If we're not careful," he has learned, "life can quickly become predictable, monotonous, a drag" (p. 80). However, the discovery of his "spitting image," a minor actor in the video, Daniel Santa-Clara, awakens Afonso from his pathetic existence, and leads him on an obsessive quest to discover his double image, while hiding his efforts from his coworkers, his lover, Maria da Paz, and even his mother. While his project leads Afonso out of his boring life, it ultimately results in identity issues with his depraved double involving sex and power. THE DOUBLE is ultimately about what makes each person unique, despite the possibility that one may share an identical physical appearance with another. Like the Portugese novelist's other books, THE DOUBLE requires the reader's full attention to follow the stream-of-consciousness narrative. And while this meandering novel may not measure up to Saramago's previous standards set by BLINDNESS and THE CAVE, it nevertheless provides a compelling reading experience.

G. Merritt




Rating:
Summary: Good But Not A Masterpiece
Review: I am a huge fan of Jose Saramago and everything that makes him a genius of prose is on display here: his long, convoluted paragraphs forcing the reader to bring his full concentration to the task of reading; his odd plot choice, in this case the fact that two absolutely identical though unrelated people live in the same city; and his ability to bring his characters to vivid life. All of which make this book a very enjoyable read.

On the other hand, when you're dealing with a master like Saramago, unfairly or not, you hold him to a higher standard--himself. This is not his best book. I think that what is missing is the "importance" of his other novels. What we learn in this novel doesn't seem nearly worth the effort. Unlike masterpieces like Blindness and The Cave, this novel's revelations seem more superficial than the deep discoveries of some of his other work.

Certainly, this is a novel worth reading but for a reader new to Saramago, I would start someplace else first and come to this one later. You'll be better served.

Rating:
Summary: "Am I really a mistake, he wondered."
Review: In what may be Jose Saramago's most playful novel, Tertuliano Maximo Afonso, a secondary school history teacher, views a film and is stunned to discover an actor who looks exactly like him in every respect. "One of us is a mistake," he declares, and as he begins (typically) to overanalyze the fact that "never before in the history of humanity have two identical people existed in the same place and time," he finds himself wondering what it would be like to discover and meet this double.

Renting dozens of videos in an effort to identify the look-alike actor he saw in the film, Tertuliano finds his life transformed--"as if he were...in a corridor joining heaven and hell," and he wonders "where he had come from and where he would go to next." Enlisting his girlfriend, Maria da Paz, to help him find the address of actor Daniel Santa Clara, without telling her the whole story about his double, he learns that the actor's real name is Antonio Claro, contacts him by telephone, and arranges to meet him at a remote place, where a series of profound, dramatic ironies unfolds.

Telling Tertuliano's story is a bold and quirky narrator. Self-conscious about his writing, the narrator digresses, acts patronizing toward Tertuliano, and often makes arch comments about him to the reader. He manipulates the reader, jokes with him as he constructs Tertuliano's story, plays with logic and language, creates conversations and debates between Tertuliano and Common Sense, reflects on the origins and destinies of words, and generally shows off, acting as a foil for Tertuliano Maximo Afonso, whose own "emotions have never been strong or enduring."

Saramago raises serious questions about identity and destiny, presenting Tertuliano Maximo Afonso and Antonio Claro (Daniel Santa Clara) as they compare their lives, recognize their different approaches to life, and then find their natural curiosity becoming transformed into resentment. "There is one too many of us in the world," Tertuliano declares. The climax is shocking--quite different from what the reader expects--and just when you think the surprises have ended, a final surprise awaits.

Readers new to Saramago should be forewarned that his style can be off-putting--page after page of run-on sentences, few paragraphs indentations, and a lack of quotation marks. The reader must read dialogue carefully, since there is no punctuation to set off which remarks are made by which character. Despite this flouting of convention, however, Saramago achieves a remarkably conversational tone, and this often humorous novel reads quickly. Lively and clever, The Double gives us the game of life, played with a whole new set of rules. Mary Whipple


Rating:
Summary: Through The Looking Glass With Saramago
Review: Saramago's "The Double" is a beautifully worded and somewhat experimental novel that truly earns the title true literature. In a masterful tale, the author immediately brings the reader into the story, by including him in most of the secrets of the book, in advance of the characters. In several places the author speaks directly to the reader, and is ever conscious of how certain items in his rendition, and the plot twists may appear to the reader.

In an additional artful turn, the use of most periods and quotation marks is dispensed with, leaving the reader to mentally insert them in the appropriate places. Periods are rare, and paragraphs are rarer. Chapters are lengthy, but not in anyway boring, more knuckle whitening, if anything. And the author comments to the reader on anomalies and potential paths for which the plot may proceed.

But at the core of the story is an identity crisis; one of the most extreme variety. Not only does our protagonist have a problem with his own identity in a psychological manner. He actually has a problem with his identity in a physical manner. He discovers, virtually by accident, that he has an identical double within the same city limits as he himself lives.

To compound the dilemma, Saramago makes the "double" an actor. He makes him a person who takes on the character and personality of other people, and sometimes perhaps, may not have a personality of their own. They may in fact be identical in character; they may in fact be the same person. If they are, is one of them superfluous? This is the question Saramago poses. And within it all, are the inevitable, and in fact surreal consequences of the actions that are taken by this discovery of a "double."

It has been said that the act of observation changes the behavior of the observed. In this book, Saramago makes that fact very plain to the reader. And yet, it is something that could happen so easily to anyone, at least seem to happen to anyone. And something that is not easily resolvable.

Saramago speaks on several plains of consciousness throughout the book. The novel is recommended for all readers who enjoy serious modern literature. And for those who have a deep interest in the internal workings of the minds of men, and women. One should not pass up the opportunity to read this book.


Rating:
Summary: A rule-breaking and thought-provoking novel
Review: Since THE DOUBLE was my first Jose Saramago book, it was eagerly anticipated. I had heard high praise about THE CAVE. The author's name had been mentioned in some surprising circles. So I'm not sure what I expected here. What I got was a book like no other --- in some ways incredible, in other ways bewildering.

Just the lead character's name, Tertuliano Maximo Afonso, strikes a discordant note from the beginning. And Saramago rarely uses less than all three names, and almost never uses the pronoun. He emphasizes the name's rarity first, among many instances, when Tertuliano Maximo Afonso has to identify himself for the clerk at a video rental store. He rents a video from this previously mentioned clerk at the suggestion of a teacher of mathematics at the school where he, Tertuliano Maximo Afonso, teaches history. The video is unremarkable but for one aspect: A supporting actor with barely a speaking part is identical in appearance to Tertuliano Maximo Afonso. Identical.

Tertuliano Maximo Afonso, recently depressed and lethargic --- too depressed and lethargic to extricate himself from a lackluster relationship with long-time paramour Maria da Paz --- discovers a renewed purpose to his days. He embarks on a mission to locate this actor with his face. He muses whether identical looks (right down to years-old scars and mole placements) means identical times of death. He muses about other things, too. In fact, Tertuliano Maximo Afonso muses, it seems, all day long.

Engulfed in his quest for at least a glimpse of his double, Tertuliano Maximo Afonso neglects not only Maria da Paz, who is recently asking some hard questions, but his mother as well, who is also asking some hard questions, just not the same ones. Tertuliano Maximo Afonso's obsession leads him to neglect most areas of his life that do not involve the actor. He may, it turns out, have taken his mission too far.

This is a book to pay attention to. While at first Saramago's style may be off-putting to some (a spectacularly run-on sentence may go on for a full page; paragraphs may go on for three, no quotation marks are used, very few speaker tags, and you will never see a dash or an interrogatory), it brazenly dares the reader to look beyond proper grammatical conventions and simply read the message. It defies all the rules. Saramago has a rhythm to his writing that, once you have it, propels you into the story with enthusiastic speed. THE DOUBLE provides excellent fodder for provoking thought. It is perplexing, comical, even absurd. A guaranteed head shaker.

--- Reviewed by Kate Ayers

Rating:
Summary: Which One Of Us Is Me?
Review: Tertuliano Maximo Afonso is a middle-aged, middle school history teacher--an unremarkable, passive and self-absorbed man who is suffering from mild depression, or is it boredom? A colleague suggests he rent a certain movie. A bit player in the movie turns out to look exactly as he does. The history teacher becomes obsessed with this man, ruminates about the nature of identity, and sets out to find this man who looks like him.

Eventually the two men meet, but instead of feeling a kinship or a sense of being brothers they react to each other with suspicion, mistrust and resentment. Their identical appearance is taken to mean that only one of them can be the real person--the other is merely a copy. But which one? The question is explored in long-winded excess by Tertuliano, a man who is pathetically self-absorbed and thinks too much.Meanwhile he neglects and misuses everyone around him.

Thus begins a love-hate (shall we say) relationship that ends in disaster. I will say no more about the plot--you will just have to read the book.

Author Jose Saramago is not for everyone, and this book in particular is not for everyone. As a nobel laureate I suppose he is permitted to break all the rules of novel-writing, and he certainly does. He does not "show" what the characters are thinking and feeling, he "tells" us--in excruciating detail. He constantly intrudes into the action with authorial commentary, laughing at the characters, telling us what is going to happen to them, analyzing their actions, and philosophizing. Some of his thoughts are brilliantly put, but getting at them is hard work. I found this novel unbearably tedious and hard to read until I was half-way through it. In the last half, things began to pick up, and in the last hundred pages, it was hard to put it down.The surprise ending was stunning.

Conclusions: If you're a fan of Saramago you will like it. If you don't mind long Proustian sentences, rambling digressions, page after page without paragraphing, and lengthy dialogues without a single quotation mark--well--this may be just the book for you. I recommend it but not for everyone. Reviewed by Louis N. Gruber.


Rating:
Summary: Not up to the Master's standards
Review: While I greatly liked Saramago's "Blindness", and "All the Names" and considered "The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis" an interesting, yet not entirely successful experiment, I considered "The Double", which revisits some territory that the Master visited in the latter two books below his high standards.

A depressed, divorced teacher who is in a tortuous relationship gets a hint from a colleague to watch a so, so movie on video, in which an actor playing a minor role bears an uncanny similarity to him. Due to his depression this revelation throws the teacher into an existential crisis, which results in him contacting his double.

Compared to Ricardo Reis and the Names Saramago does little in developing and elaborating this theme. Instead, we get a long series of musings reflecting on the characters, the premise and the, until the last pages, limited development of the story.
While the musings which vary between the philosophical, comical, sarcastic and affectionate often reveal Saramago's superior writing skills, the lack of a stronger fictional framework greatly limits this books scope.

Moreover, while both pitch and pacing of "Blindness" and "The Names" were flawless, the Double had a level of chunkiness that I had previously not encountered in Saramago's works.